p2v Win7 desktop to Windows Virtual Desktop

[Daniel Corkill]

Just wanted to run this idea past the community to see if it's possible. I'm with a customer that has old hardware running Win7 and various legacy apps that either can't run on Win10 or they've lost the media for. What I'm hoping is possible is that I can p2v this box into Windows Virtual Desktop and configure a new piece of hardware running Win10 to auto start WVD with the Win7 desktop. Is that achievable?

On a side note, my understanding is that if a Win7 machine is put into WVD that it will receive 3 extra years of extended support at no cost, is this accurate?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Daniel Corkill ,

This could be possible (in theory)!

These would be the steps:

1. Create a VHD from your Win7 VM
   (perhaps with Disk2vhd https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd)
2. Run through these steps:
   Prepare a Windows VHD or VHDX to upload to Azure
   (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/prepare-for-upload-vhd-image)
3. Use that image to deploy a new VM in Azure behind the WVD service

If you have the Win7 running in Hyper-V, you can also use Azure Migrate to migrate the VM to Azure, without making the Win7 into an Azure Image first:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/tutorial-migrate-hyper-v

This is all theory of-course. 

You will have to do some testing :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: